In this time and others like it
by Sunshine170
Summary: Parenthood is complicated enough on its own without having to contend with multiple pasts and futures infinite and more than one universe. The only constant is the love we feel for our children. Multi-character fic.


It's the way she looks at him that is his undoing.

There's too much trust there, unconditional, unwavering… absolute.

And he's not used to having people look at him that way.

It's one of the first things he notices about her… after the delirium caused by the happiness beating painfully against his chest subsides just so.

"She's so beautiful." Olivia's tired voice filters in through the fuzz his head has been for the past so many hours.

"Yes she is..." He nods, thinking anyone would be a fool to disagree. He's biased yes, because he doesn't believe there could be another sight quite as breath taking as the one in his arms and anyone who thought otherwise was clearly in the wrong. "That's all your doing though."

"What's the matter?" She asks him then, clearly clued into the shift in his emotional state.

"Hmm?"

"You look….. surprised."

"Nothing it's just…she's here." He shrugs. "She's really here and she's an actual person and everything. I just didn't really realize there was going to be a baby at the end of all this."

"I thought you were good at science. That's what almost always happens with pregnancies. There's a baby at the end of it." She explains with a mildly condescending look.

"Are you absolutely sure she's mine though?"

"Excuse me?"

"It's just… I can't believe I had anything to do with something so perfect. Things that include my involvement usually end up being monumental screw-ups."

He can't remember anything in his life that had turned out so…unblemished. Even his relationship with Olivia… and god how he loved her, but it was so fucked on so many levels even if they did make it work.

"We can do a paternity test to be sure if you'd like." She says in a dry voice, more patient of his statement this time than amused. "If it turns out that she's not yours then I'll have to make a call to the Vatican and let them know about the second Immaculate Conception since Jesus."

"That's real funny." Peter rolls his eyes somewhat distractedly, his hands gently raking through the baby's fuzzy scalp, his heart beating too loudly.

"You're really going to trust me with this Dunham?" He asks softly, his voice colored with a tinge of self-disparagement that doesn't go unnoticed by Olivia.

"It's not like I have much of a choice, now do I?" She jokes, shrugging. "Love the one you're with… or the one who knocked you up I guess."

He smiles at her, before his expression turns contemplative "You don't have to you know…." he shakes his head, his voice hesitant. "Be with me for her sake. I'd understand if you changed your mind, if you want to do this alone. We both know she'll probably be better off without…"

"Did you bump into something and hurt your head?" Her voice is still tired but uncharacteristically shrill, making Peter look up at her with some amount of surprise.

"I didn't mean…"

"No you did mean…" She cuts him off, her voice now very angry and it's evident she is upset with him and maybe it the residual hormones or maybe she's just so goddam tired of Peter doing this to himself, but she's not letting their competing ability to self- doubts back in this relationship anymore.

They wasted two and half years doing that and she'll be damned if they waste another second on that nonsense.

"What the hell is the matter with you?" She almost yells, well as much as anyone could in a hospital with a half asleep infant in their arms could. "Peter… this is your daughter. You are responsible for bringing her into this world, something which you've been extremely cocky about for the last few months if I recall. Why are you acting like this now?"

"Liv, I am not…"

"How can you say something like that? How can you even think it?" She gives him a stern look, a look she usually reserved for clumsy rookies, before taking the baby from his arms into her own.

"God, I can't believe you sometimes." She huffs, shaking her head. "What is it going to take for you to stop doubting yourself? What do you want me to say Peter? That everything will be fine. That we'll have the perfect family life together and nothing will ever go wrong. Is that the kind of guarantee you're looking for? Because that's just not going to happen and you know that as well as I do."

He doesn't say anything at that and nods silently.

"You know… if you've come to the realization that maybe this isn't the life for you, then there's the door. You can leave right now and never look back." She says then.

"Olivia…" He stares at her in shock.

"I mean it. If this is not what you want, you don't have to do this with me." She sighs. " But if you think you're going to leave me alone in this just because you're worried about screwing up and so you'd rather not try then sorry to disappoint but I am not letting you off that easily."

"I couldn't leave you if I tried." He says then simply, bending down to press a soft kiss on the baby's forehead, which causes her to fidget a little waving an uncoordinated arm at his face. He clasps the tiny hand swinging at his chin, grinning like mad when she grips his finger with unusual strength.

"Good." Olivia lets out the shaky breath she's been holding. "Because I couldn't let you go if I tried."

* * *

"They had a baby girl." He tells her, pressing a kiss to her hair.

"Who did?" She asks, eyes closed, her hands lazily stroking the arm he had around her.

"Peter and Olivia." He mumbles against her bare skin and she turns around to look at him with surprise. "I was monitoring the intelligence feed from the other side and I guess Broyles included the information for my benefit. It was last week."

"She had a baby… with the secretary's son?" She smiles, going over the math in her head to quickly confirm her suspicions. "She was pregnant even before we closed the bridge."

"Yeah…guess she was."

"Wow… those two don't waste any time do they?" She laughs. "I knew she had a thing for him, from the moment she tried to tell me he was my type. The way she got all defensive about it."

Lincoln smiles at the glint in her eyes but doesn't tell her that time or timelines more precisely were not really a factor where the two were concerned. They had lived past, present and future together and if anything it's about time…

But it's not his place to tell that story. It doesn't belong to him.

"They named her Henrietta." He tells her instead.

She freezes for a minute when she hears that.

"What? What's wrong?" He asks her.

"It's a pretty name." She says and tries not to think any more about it.

* * *

Déjà vu

Olivia doesn't get them really. She's never grasped that concept to be true.

But the past few hours have been alarming in their familiarity and also so very different.

She's not alone this time. Lincoln's there with her.

He was there the last time too.

Last time?

There wasn't a last time.

But she holds him now in her arms, shaky, exhausted and happy beyond limits and it's okay and it's not okay at the same time.

"He's beautiful." She hears her husband say, and she agrees every bit.

"He really is." She laughs between sobs she can't help and runs a hand through the baby's fuzzy scalp.

* * *

"You have to stop doing this you know." He tells her, putting his arms around her as she stares into the crib and watches her son's right arm fidget beneath the blankets as he lets out a sigh and sniffles in his sleep.

"He keeps us up enough as it is without you volunteering to stand by while he sleeps." Lincoln tells her.

"I know." She squeezes the hand circling her.

"Come to bed. You need your sleep."

"Just a little while longer." She whispers and Lincoln chuckles at that, barely audibly, kissing her forehead and leaves her be.

"He'll still be here in the morning you know." He tells her before making his way back to their bedroom.

_I hope so._ She thinks knowing just how absurd that is.

_He's mine. I get to keep him. _ She tells her self.

_This time. I get to keep him._

_This time?_

* * *

_How are you mine? _ Olivia thinks as she holds her daughter in her arms and rocks her gently. She's fallen asleep already but Olivia continues to hold her instead of putting her back in the crib like she should.

She doesn't know how this could have happened to her. Well she does know… actually. She knows exactly how it happened. But she can't help feeling the sense of incredulity that overwhelms her every now and then. The unreal sense of pride she feels when she goes out with Etta and people peer into her stroller and tell her how beautiful her baby is.

She's not used to feeling that way at all.

But she thanks whatever stroke of luck made it possible for her to have this child and call her hers.

"You have no idea how much I love you." She whispers to the sleeping infant, her finger nudging the smidgen of her nose, barely any bigger than the tip of her index finger.

"You coming to bed Liv?" Peter calls softly from the doorway.

"Just a little while longer." She tells him.

* * *

Etta's first word is 'dada'. Peter is ecstatic and Olivia is not surprised. Three weeks later she calls her 'mama' for the first time.

She cries.

Trevor's first word is cookie. He learns to say mama a week later.

She cries

* * *

"Doggy…" Etta squeals excitedly when they pass by a pet shop display window and she catches sight of a bunch of golden retriever puppies. "Can I have a doggy mommy please?" She says looking at her hopefully.

Olivia laughs and shakes her head. "Oh I wish honey. But you know we can't have one in the house. Doggies make daddy sick. "

"Coz he's allergic." Etta says pronouncing the word slowly, deliberately, remembering the conversation from last time. "Can't we get a doggy that doesn't make daddy sick?"

Olivia smiles, and ruffles her hair. "I am sure your grandpa would have found a way to get you a doggy that didn't make daddy sick...if he was here."

* * *

"He's mine momma? Really?" Trevor says excitedly as he pets the chocolate lab in his arms.

"Yes honey, he's all yours." Olivia smiles taking in the glee on her five year old's face.

"But you gotta take care of him buddy." Lincoln tells him as his hand comes to join his son's giving the puppy a scratch behind the ear. "He's going to be your responsibility from now on."

"I'll take the bestest care of him daddy. I promise." The little boy says somberly, clutching the squirming dog all that closer to him who wiggles out of his grip and scampers off, leading Trevor to go after it.

Lincoln laughs and turns his gaze to Olivia and rolls his eyes. "I hope you realize we're going to be doing all the work. You had to cave in and let him have a dog? Didn't you?"

"Look at him. He's so happy." She shrugs.

"For a badass fringe agent, you're a total pushover when it comes to that boy, you know that." He smirks at her before joining his son with their new pet on the floor

"What do you think we should call him momma?" Her son asks her then.

Lincoln's lab was called Fudge, she remembers. She died two months after he got shot.

"You can name him whatever you like." She tells him.

* * *

They're at breakfast when the package arrives at their lake house. It's delivered by a military personnel and though it's addressed to her, they make Walter sign several pages of documentation before she can receive it.

"What is it?" She asks curiously, as he hands the package to her.

"It was sent from the other side…. from Peter." He says after a small uncertain pause.

Elizabeth doesn't say anything but he doesn't miss the way her hands begin to shake as she cuts the parcel open. She had been told of course about the bridge being reopened… but she had tried not to think all that much of it.

She pulls out a leather bound album and opens it to the picture of a young girl with long blond hair and blue eyes, smiling with a wide toothy grin.

She reads the note folded inside, next to the picture.

_Her name's Henrietta…. we call her Etta though. She turned seventeen a month ago._

_Thank you…_

- _Peter_

"Who is this?" Walter asks joining her on the couch. Her fingers tremble as she runs them over the picture.

"It's our granddaughter." She says simply, no longer bothered with semantics, smiling as his hand comes to join hers.

He cancels all his appointments and they spend all day looking at the pictures together.

* * *

He knows how ridiculous he looks, with that two sizes too small party hat on his head, but as he watches Etta unwrap her presents and takes in the excitement on her face, he doesn't care so much.

He'll play a clown any number of times if it means he gets to see that smile on her face.

Three years…. he allows himself to savor the feeling; three years where the universe has decided to let up and just give them a break for once, allow them to enjoy days like this.

Unbidden a thought comes to him, when he sees Etta blow out her birthday candles.

His son would have been four this year…

He's many things but he's not a hypocrite; he cannot really grieve the loss of what he never had.

He never knew his son the way he knows Etta. Has never held him in his arms or touched his face or heard his voice.

The honest truth is that Peter does not love his son the way he loves his daughter. He would have… there's no doubt in his mind he would have, even if he was living proof of the worst mistake he has ever made in his life.

If he had known him, even known of him… he would have loved him.

But all he really has is the knowledge of his existence, or the lack of it to be more precise.

And it's not enough to make him feel what he feels for Etta, not even a fraction of it.

The least, the only thing he could do is make him a namesake for his daughter.

But he wonders… Wonders every time he sees his daughter, if his son would have been as amazing as her. Wonders if he had his eyes like Etta did, or if they were green like his mother's. If he would have grown up to have her blond hair and her chubby cheeks, if he would have smiled like her, or spoken like her.

He wonders if Olivia would have found it in her heart to accept his son if he had lived, if she would have come back to him at all.

He wonders about many things. If they would even have ever had their Etta if Henry hadn't been erased. He wonders if his daughter's fate was like his, to be a changeling…to have been given to him in place of what was taken away.

It makes him uneasy to think about it that way. Like his children had been no more than indistinguishable items of exchange in some grand design to restore cosmic balance, casualties in the process of righting the wrongs that came out of an unexpected turn of events.

If anything, logically it should have been the other way around; it was his daughter whose birth should have been the anomaly, the exception.

After all she was the one who was a child of two universes, of two people who had defied the logic of time and space and nature too many times.

And yet despite it all…despite them being from entirely different worlds, despite him being wiped out of existence, despite Olivia losing all memories of him, despite Cortexiphan, despite Olivia jumping out of a helicopter into the middle of a fucking ocean and did he mention… dying for a significant few minutes while already pregnant and despite the massive clusterfuck that their relationship had been plagued with (it still never ceases to surprise him that they actually ever managed to procreate) since time immemorial…

She had made it into this world…she had lived.

And his son, whose conception or birth, he can only presume did not face such dire obstacles hadn't.

"Daddy this is the yummiest cake ever." Etta tells him with a widest, face smeared with chocolate icing as she offers him a squashed , disintegrated slice in her outstretched palm.

"Why don't we get him some in a plate? You'll get cake all over him." Olivia laughs and reaches out to hold Etta's wrists gingerly, batting them away from Peter's shirt.

"That's okay." He shrugs, letting his daughter feed him the messy piece of cake, not at all surprised when she giggles and slathers icing all over his face.

He laughs with her. "You're absolutely right kiddo. That is the yummiest cake ever…"

* * *

It's hard not to keep staring at the boy.

It's not him. Peter knows that. And yet he can't help imagining…. Using his face to picture another.

The thought alone is enough to pick at a scab he'd long assumed healed.

Because he might look everything like his father, but he has his mother's eyes. A genetic reversal from his own daughter, who imitated Olivia's physicality down to the number of freckles on her right temple.

Except he's not _him. He wasn't his. _ He was Lincoln's.

Lincoln's proud, he can tell, of his son and his wife and his family and Peter's more than happy for him.

It's not a contest after all. They all got what they wanted in the end, regardless of the paths that led them there.

He never told him of course the way in which his life had collided with the other _her_, that they had once shared more than an intimate history in another life, that she had ostensibly had feelings for him at some point.

But it never happened, so why taint her with a past she has no recollection of? One that never even transpired. Lincoln's Olivia was by all respects a different entity from the woman he had taken pictures with at a photo booth and then cornered at gun point in a train station.

But the boy being here, in his living room, living and breathing…. a reality made true out of several possibilities, it makes it difficult to not remember the horror of that entire year.

More than anything, it makes it hard to not think about his son as he watches Lincoln with his.

He's not jealous. He has never bought into the ridiculous sexist notion about men wanting sons to brandish about as badges of their manliness.

It's not the kind of man he is.

But it's the inescapable guilt of his actions, committed almost eighteen years ago that causes him that rare moment of conflicted feeling he hasn't felt in so long.

"You're awfully silent dad?" Etta tells him as they load the dishwasher that night after their guests have left and Olivia leaves upstairs ordering them to clean up. "And I know for a fact that doesn't just happen in nature…. so what's up?"

"It's nothing. Just seeing them after all these years… makes me think about things." He shrugs, giving her a smile.

"What kind of things?" She asks curiously.

"Not the kind of things I could tell you." He tells her honestly and they leave it at that, because he doesn't like lying to her and she knows not to ask when he gives her that look.

"He's a sweet kid isn't he? Trevor…" She says after a brief silence, regarding him with a careful expression.

"Yeah he is." He nods.

"You kept looking at him all evening." She says then.

"Was I?" His voice is casual.

"Yeah, you kept looking at him like you were expecting to see someone else."

He laughs, because he's not surprised that she notices. She shares the knack for quiet observation much like her mother and he'd like to think she has his skill for reading people.

"He reminds me of someone." He says, shutting the lid of the now full dishwasher.

"Who?"

"Someone I never got a chance to know."

"That doesn't make a lot of sense." She says pointedly. And he nods.

"Many things don't make sense. If you think about it, this whole evening wouldn't make sense to a normal person."

"Yeah, intergalactic dinner parties are pretty surreal on the list of things." She says wryly, before smiling at him. "But it'd be nice to see Trevor again. He promised me a zeppelin ride if I ever visited the other side."

"Like a date?" Peter asks suspiciously, all other thoughts flying out his mind in one instant. "Oh god, please don't tell me, you like him or something, because even disregarding the fact that its borderline incest… long distance dating across parallel universes is not a great idea. And I speak from experience."

"God no…" Etta wrinkles her nose distastefully at him. "Why would you even go there? I just meant he's okay to hang out with."

"Right." Peter nods somewhat chagrined.

"Plus you know dad, he's too nice, and I don't really go for that sort of thing." She shrugs nonchalantly, making Peter snort unexpectedly.

"If there was ever any doubt in my mind about how much you're like your mother…." He chuckles before he looks at her and really looks at her.

"What?" She raises a brow at him in question.

"I don't know if I tell you this enough… but you know I love you more than anything in the world don't you?"

"You tell me all the time." She shakes her head at him, curious, obviously at his behavior but prudent enough to not question him about it. She gives him a quick hug.

"Night dad." She tells him before making her way upstairs.

* * *

Olivia can only imagine what Peter must be going through as he meets Trevor.

She'll ask him about it later on. Another half-formed conversation they'll have about his son, with him not knowing how to tell her and her not knowing what to say.

Right now as she sees the boy, she only feels relief. Relief that what had been taken from the other had been returned in full measure.

She no longer feels…. like she stole a child from _her. _


End file.
